Big Ten officially adopts new East and West football divisions for 2014

The Big Ten officially announced today that it will scrap its Legends and Leaders football divisions for 2014, and split into East and West. And beginning in 2016, each Big Ten team will play a nine-game conference schedule.

The Gophers will play in the Legends Division for just one more season, along with Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Nebraska and Northwestern.

Beginning in 2014, the Gophers will be in the West Division, along with Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Northwestern, Purdue and Wisconsin.

The East Division will feature Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, Penn State and Rutgers.

The conference's presidents and chancellors voted unanimously today to approve the new division format, along with the nine-game conference schedule for 2016 and beyond.

“Big Ten directors of athletics concluded four months of study and deliberation with unanimous approval of a future football structure that preserved rivalries and created divisions based on their primary principle of East/West geography,” Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said in the press release. “The directors of athletics also relied on the results of a fan survey commissioned by BTN last December to arrive at their recommendation, which is consistent with the public sentiment expressed in the poll.”

Newer Post

Randy Johnson has been covering college football in one form or another since the early 1990s. He was the Star Tribune’s main college football editor on the copy desk for nearly two decades before returning to reporting in August 2017 as the beat writer for Gophers football. Randy has covered a Rose Bowl (Joe Paterno’s 1994 Penn State team), and he covered a John Gutekunst-coached Gophers team that missed out on the 1990 Weed-Eater Bowl. Email Randy to talk about the Gophers.